


By Any Other Name

by pettycoat



Category: A Rose for Emily - William Faulkner
Genre: Disturbing Themes, F/M, Fandom Growth Exchange, Gen, Horror, Period-Typical Racism, Period-Typical Sexism, Southern Gothic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-05
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-07-17 09:11:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16092539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pettycoat/pseuds/pettycoat
Summary: Let her be another woman.





	By Any Other Name

**Author's Note:**

  * For [outruntheavalanche](https://archiveofourown.org/users/outruntheavalanche/gifts).



> For the 2018 Fandom Growth Exchange.

It seems like such a waste, to cut a flower and leave it to die. So many had been forced on her the day the town had stolen her father, and Emily had been left alone to suffer their withering, their rot, their curling browning petals and their wretched perfume. The worst had gone out with the kitchen scraps, more food for the garden. The prettiest had been wrapped in paper and pressed between the pages of her father’s Bible. A day left alone, a week, and those flowers would live forever. Emily keeps them safe and close and watches the gardens for anything else she can save.

“Oh, that one’s just lovely,” Emily says one morning, the early summer sun painting gold on her feet and a glass of lemonade warming in her fingers. The kitchen is cool and bright, the tree beyond the jalousie bursting with blooms. “Wouldn’t you agree, Tobe?”

Tobe looks up from the cutting board just long enough to give a perfunctory glance. His hair is almost entirely white and he now needs a stool while he works, but his hands remain steady with a knife. He still doesn’t ask questions.

“I think I’d like the one nearest the window,” Emily says. “That one on the very tip of the branch. Tobe, would you?”

Tobe goes. He cuts it down with utmost care and presents it to her like it’s made of glass. It’s a large magnolia. It will need to be cut in half before it can be saved. Emily smiles as she takes it from him and turns it in her hands, mindful of the petals. The old grandfather clock standing guard in the parlor rings ten by the time she says anything more.

“I’ve been thinking of taking up my china painting again. Homer says he’s missed the children so. I think it would do him well, to open our home to them once more.” She lets that sit. Tobe goes on chopping. “That Sartoris girl had the prettiest smile. Don’t you think she painted the most lovely roses?”

Tobe doesn’t answer. As he should. Her father had always said a man like Tobe was better seen than heard.

“I’ll need new brushes,” Emily says, “and paints. Perhaps a new bottle of solvent. And I’ll need you to dig up some older china pieces from storage. Anything the girls could practice on without fear.” She stares at his back. “Tobe, would you?”

Tobe pulls on his shoes as soon as breakfast is done, donning a hat in the time it takes Emily to clutch the magnolia in her pale, sweating fingers and push up from the table to carry it into the parlor. Yellowed linoleum falls to dusty, creaking wood. “Good morning, Father,” Emily says as she passes his portrait. She turns him around when she takes the knife from the mantle and very carefully slices the flower down the middle. It isn’t ladylike, to carry a blade. What would he say if he saw her? She wraps one half in paper and presses it between the gilded pages of Genesis and presses the other half to her breast, cradling it as she eases her way to the top of the stairs.

“Homer?” Emily calls. “Darling?”

No answer. The poor thing is so terribly sick.

“Tobe,” Emily calls, softer. Her only answer is the slightest creaking of floorboards. “Would you?”

The weeks sink into summer with a low, lazy heat. Tobe has taken to sleeping in the cellar, first on warmer nights, then for days at a time, and it’s never any less perplexing when Emily sees just how much a cot and a dirt floor can ruin a man. But he’s always there when she needs him, often when she doesn’t, and Emily lets him do as he likes, content to let him wither. Her china-painting lessons provide enough of a distraction. First she admits a dark-haired girl, a daughter of a family with so little to their name that Emily considers it charity to take her into her father’s home. The girl doesn’t last long. She fidgets too much. Then comes a tawny-haired girl, one with slightly more weight to her name. Emily forgets it by the third lesson. And somehow she reminds Emily of Homer, of his easy grins and that eagerness to stay close. If they ever have a daughter, Emily thinks she would be a lot like the tawny-haired girl. But even the prettiest girls need discipline. Emily looks over her brush to find the tawny-haired girl fiddling with her braid. Too many of the younger generation have forgotten their roots. The world beyond her door has been tainted by time. Emily thinks back to the first girl who had arrived for a painting lesson, one of Colonel Sartoris’s daughters, or perhaps one of his granddaughters, a rose-cheeked little angel who had hair as fine and blonde as cornsilk. Surely that girl has her own daughters by now? Or has she only just flowered? Emily pulls another branch from the paint and leans back to inspect the tawny-haired girl’s work. This one isn’t dressed like a lady of gentility. What a shame that she hides that beauty behind such a boyish demeanor. Her hair is in her face, and her dress hardly goes past her calves. Her poor father must be so ashamed.

“She has such a pretty smile,” Emily murmurs one evening, perhaps to Tobe, perhaps to herself. Sometimes it’s hard to remember. The kitchen grows warmer and warmer as Tobe sits hunched over the stove, a stool beneath him and a knife in hand. “Shame about the rest of her.”

Tobe makes no comment. Emily watches as he chops a squash into coins and sets them in a bowl. Despite everything else, his hands are sure. Emily sips at a glass of water that tastes vaguely metallic. It isn’t long before she settles over the table. Or perhaps it is. Time has no place in her thoughts. She glances over at the china hutch gathering dust in the corner and smiles secretively to herself. She hasn’t opened it in years. She hasn’t needed to. Not since the night she became Mrs. Emily Barron.

But the thought lingers. Flowers pressed in pages, rats in their traps, men in their marriage beds. All plucked from life so they could live forever, like figures painted on china. Father had once told her that she was the only proper girl left in this town. Something to be locked up for display, never to be tainted. She’d worn her family’s name like a mantle until Homer had gifted her his own. And now she has gifted him a life free from the leers of those horrid men in the Elks’ Club. Let the townsfolk say whatever they like. Homer Barron is finally a marrying man. And Emily Grierson has been dead for years. Poor Emily? Poor Jefferson. They will never know how much she’s done for them.

And she can still save others.

“Tobe?” Emily asks. “Once supper is over, would you fetch the key to the china hutch?”

Tobe stops just long enough, not even risking a glance her way as he stares fixedly down at the cutting board. And then it’s back to chopping.

“Poor thing,” Emily murmurs, taking another sip as she stares out into the garden. The tawny-haired girl could have such a better life. “Poor, poor thing.”

The morning sees her huddled over a china plate, the girl beside her and Tobe out buying groceries. He’s taking much longer than usual. Emily wonders if they’ve delayed another shipment. Homer had always told her that this town needed better workers.

“Miss Emily?” the girl with the tawny hair calls.

Emily snaps out of her reverie, the squirrel-hair brush still clutched in her hand. “Oh. Yes.” She twirls the brush by the handle until she has the rough likeness of a dogwood blossom. “Like that, dear. We paint in layers. Keep your wrist firm.”

“Like this, Miss Emily?” the girl asks.

Emily doesn’t answer, staring down at her paints as she searches for the color of Homer’s eyes. Had his eyes been blue? she thinks, distressed. Yes, surely they are. She paints the little chips of china and falls back to admire her work.

“Are you thirsty, dear?” Emily asks, her voice so far away. She pushes up from her seat before the girl can answer and goes gliding into the kitchen. A pitcher of lemonade sits on the table where Tobe has left it, sweating lightly as Emily clutches it by the handle. She pours two glasses and takes a sip from one before gathering up the other and turning on her heel. But she doesn’t go back to her little makeshift studio. She turns to the china hutch, its key resting atop a fine layer of dust. The lock turns with a soft click. The hinges creak as she swings a door open.

It’s empty.

Emily stares at the shelf where the package should be, searching for that familiar skull and crossbones as the empty shadows continue to mock her. Surely it’s here. She hasn’t had any rats in years. And yet her hand meets bare wood when she finally lifts it up, the blood rushing in her ears with the roar of a coursing river. She swings the door shut and locks it up like there’s nothing out of the ordinary, taking up the lemonade glass and swiftly returning to the studio. She holds it out to the girl without a word.

“Thank you, Miss Emily.”

Emily says nothing to her for the rest of the morning.

Tobe still hasn’t returned by the time the girl gathers up her box of brushes and magazine clippings and goes out into the tainted world with a word of greeting from her mother. Morning rises to noon, day fades to evening, and Emily sits there in the parlor, staring at the front door as the grandfather clock ticks on. Moonlight shines through a crack in the curtains when she finally ventures up the stairs. She lets go of the railing, turns a corner, passes a window, stops. Then she eases her way back to the parlor, slipping through the kitchen to make her way to the back door. She swings it open and takes a breath of night air for the first time in years.

“Tobe.”

Tobe doesn’t move from the steps. His market basket sits beside him, sagging under the weight of his purchases. He doesn’t turn to look at her. Emily stares at him for a long, long time before finally lifting a finger and pointing out into the shadows.

“Tobe, would you?”

Homer’s shirt smells of tobacco smoke and dandelions when Tobe brings it in from the line. Emily presses it to her face as she stands in the shadows outside their bedroom door, smiling despite everything the day has done. All these years, and she can still smell his cigars, the sweat and the tar and the horses. She’s insisted on buying him a new one, as much of a mess he’s made of his clothes, but he’s always refused. Men and their pride. Who is she to deny him? Emily puts on her gentlest smile and opens the door to a room snared in shadow.

“Hello, darling.”

Her husband hasn’t moved from the bed since the night Tobe had beckoned him in, Emily greeting him in her mother’s lace dress with a slice of strawberry pie cooling on a plate in her fingers. She’d minded her courtesies and refused his offer to share, smiling as he’d thanked her for her time through his tobacco-stained teeth, and she’d continued smiling up to the moment he’d realized he could no longer walk. A little pain couldn’t be helped for a man in his profession. He’d gone quietly. It had been the first time he’d ever allowed her to hold him in her arms.

Emily brushes her fingers over the halved magnolia sitting atop the little silver toilet set and creeps up to his side of the bed, laying a hand over his chest and bending to kiss his brow. His skin is tight and sweatless, scraping soft against her lips like a sheet of old paper. His hair is falling out. He’d made a terrible habit of staring until she’d sewn his eyes closed. Emily pulls back the curtains to find Tobe limping across the lawn, his little old market basket as bowed and twisted as the arm he carries it over. Emily watches him until he disappears around a line of overgrown hedges. Then she draws back and dresses Homer for the night, mindful of his stiff joints. He’s smiling at her. Emily smiles back.

“Oh, darling,” she whispers gently. She eases him down on to the pillow and goes to close the door, the room sinking back into blackness. This had once been her father’s room. He’d let her sleep here when she’d had nightmares as a girl. It comes perfectly naturally when she curls in the bed beside her beloved and sinks down into a pillow that still smells of her father. A child laughs in the world outside her window. She’s always wanted children. Perhaps Homer will gift her with one. She draws into the sheets and doesn’t let go.

They’ll have been married ten years in the coming month. She turns forty-two in a week while he’ll still be thirty-nine. He’ll always be thirty-nine. She curls her arms around him and pulls him close, drifting into dreams as Tobe creeps into the room below. Homer will always be hers. She’s saved him. And she will always be his. A Grierson forever and a Grierson no more. Mrs. Emily Barron. Let that be her name.


End file.
